Reorienting Hebrew Literary History- the View From the East

8/11/2019 Reorienting Hebrew Literary History- the View From the East

1/48

y 127

Reorienting Hebrew Literary History:

The View from the East

L I T A L L E V Y

A B S T R A C T

Although Hebrew literary criticism has begun redressing the exclusion of womenand minority writers from the Hebrew canon, the literary geography of modernHebrew remains largely unquestioned. Modern Hebrew literature is still viewedas the progeny of European maskilim, while the concurrent production of belleslettres in Hebrew and other languages by non-Ashkenazi Jewries has beenoverlooked. What are the ramifications of this Eurocentric viewpoint for our

understanding of the origins of Jewish cultural modernity, of modern Hebrewliterature, and of contemporary Israeli literature produced by Mizrai andSephardi writers?

In this essay, I call for a new approach to the study of Hebrew literature and itshistory on two fronts. First, I advocate exploring the relationships between

Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Arab Jews in the multilingual corpus of Jewishliterature produced from the nineteenth century onward. Second, I proposeinvestigating the full range of cultural influences that resonate in Mizrailiterature produced in Israel. This essay focuses primarily upon the first of these twoquestions: the revision of Hebrew literary historiography. I begin by reviewing thestate of Hebrew literary historiography in relation to Mizrai writing. I thensuggest commencing my proposed historical revision with a multilingual, globalmodel of Haskalah that emphasizes reciprocal channels of cultural circulation andtransmission between and among Europe, Africa, and Asia. By way of example, Isketch the contours of modern Arab Jewish textual production beginning in thenineteenth century. The last part of the essay considers examples of HebrewArabicinterculturality in the context of Iraqi Jewry during two different historicmoments. After closely analyzing a 1920 Hebrew poem from Baghdad, I concludewith a preliminary investigation of the myriad cultural influences shaping thework of the two leading Israeli writers from Iraq, Sami Michael and ShimonBallas.


2/48

128 y Lital Levy

Set mainly in early twentieth-century Baghdad, Sami Michaels novel Viktorya

depicts the Rafael character as a new and avid reader:

And another passion gripped him. His mastery of Arabic, which he had

acquired by his own efforts, increased by leaps and bounds, and he

became a voracious reader of the world literature which was then being

translated in Cairo. . . . To his astonishment, Rafael discovered that the

spiritual giants of every age were, like him, preoccupied by thoughts of

death and sex. . . .

And there was something else which the books gave him. He

regarded himself as bold and intelligent. . . . It seemed to him that he

knew everything and was capable of anything. And now these giants of

the spirit came and taught him a lesson in humility. They spread a vast

world of profundity and imagination and wisdom out before him, and

he stood amazed and awed like a dweller on the plains looking for the

first time upon the sublime glory of the mountain peaks.1

As a consumer of modern literature printed in Arabic, Rafael represents a larger

trend among Jews in the Arab world. In the twentieth century, the Arabic-language

newspaper and book became important elements of urban modernity in places like

Baghdad and Cairo. Being an intellectual, even if one wrote in English or French,

meant having cultural fluency in Arabic. When Jewish writers from the Arab world

migrated to Israel, however, they found their Arabic-based cultural formationlargely meaningless in the new Israeli context. This predicament is related by the

Iraqi-born writer Shimon Ballas in the documentary film Forget Baghdad,2when

Ballas recalls the first article he ever wrote for an Israeli publication: an Arabic-

language piece commemorating the famous nineteenth-century Islamic intellectual

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.3Laughing, Ballas remembers his Israeli readers amaze--

ment upon discovering al-Afghani, who is a universally recognized figure among

educated Arabs.4Translated into the nearest Hebrew cultural equivalent, it would

be as though his audience had never heard of Ahad Ha-Am.


3/48

Reorienting Hebrew Literary History y 129

Europe to Tel Aviv, where in this map might we locate Baghdadby which I mean

not only the place, but the cultural world, a world shaped by the Arabic books

consumed by Rafael, by the intellectual legacy of figures such as al-Afghani? Formost scholars of modern Hebrew literature, the cultural developments of the

twentieth-century Middle East are uncharted ground. But both Mikhael and

Ballas began their literary activities in Arabic while still living in Iraq, and

continued publishing in Arabic for a decade or so after their immigration to Israel

(largely through the aegis of local communist publications such as al-Jadidand al-

Ittiad).5As writers, they are first and foremost products of the literary and cultural

environment of their native Baghdad. Even the writing of Eli Amir, who came to

Israel at a younger age and began his career in Hebrew, demonstrates a preoccupa--

tion with the cultural environment of his formative years.6 Upon emigration to

Israel, these writers, who brought with them the cultural baggage of modern

Arab culture, encountered the trajectory of twentieth-century Hebrew literature.7

Their Hebrew writings, then, would be more accurately situated at the crossroads

of at least two cultural and historic contexts: 1940s Baghdad and post-1950 Israel.

As for Mizraim born in Israel (as well as those who arrived at a young age),

both their linguistic background as native speakers of Hebrew and their education

in Israeli schools bring them considerably closer to the EuropeanAshkenazi trajec--

tory of Hebrew literature. Nevertheless, on the whole their works reflect a signifi--

cantly different cultural and historical experience and different viewpoints than

those articulated by Ashkenazi writers. Although these Israeli-born authors do not

read Arabic and are thus not directly influenced by Arabic literature, the myriadcultural influences informing their work have not yet been accounted for by Hebrew

literary historiography and criticism.8 To quote Hans Jauss, [P]rehistories are

always discovered ex eventuas prehistoryof apost-history.9In the Mizrai context,

which emerged from a moment of rupture with the past, the prehistory awaiting

(re)discovery is the modern intellectual and literary history of Jews from Asia and

Africa during the century preceding their emigration to Israel (and subsequent rein--

vention as Mizraim).10This overlooked history is perhaps relevant to the study

of contemporary Mizrai writing in Israel not in the traditional sense of literary


4/48

130 y Lital Levy

In this essay, I call for a new approach to the study of Hebrew literature and

its history on two related fronts. First, I advocate redressing the Eurocentrism of

Hebrew literary historiography, with an eye to exploring the relationships betweenAshkenazim, Sephardim, and Arab Jews in Jewish literature produced from the

nineteenth century onward. Second, I propose investigating the full range of

cultural influences that resonate in Mizrai literature produced in Israel. In this

limited venue, my own initial efforts at addressing these lacunae will focus

primarily on the question of Hebrew literary historiography. Although my argu--

ments pertain to Ladino-speaking Jewry as well as to speakers of Persian and

Central Asian Jewish dialects, my own research focuses on intersections of

Hebrew and Arabic, and hence my examples are drawn from the corpus of writing

by Arab Jews.

Now for a few clarifications. I am not suggesting a history in the sense of a

separate but equal narrative of continuous evolution that would simply parallel

the existing narrative of Hebrew literature. Rather, I call for a more comprehen--

sive history of Jewish writing that integrates non-European writers and seeks

connections across regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Nor do I call for

a nostalgic search for Mizrai origins,or imply that the literary developments

discussed below constitute historic stepping stones whose significance culminates

in a telos, that of contemporary Mizrai literature in Israel.12I also do not struc--

ture my argument in comparative (competitive) terms, focusing on questions of

quantity or quality. Relative to the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, Jewish

writers in southeastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and India did notplay a major role in the development of modern Hebrew literature in the nine--

teenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the issue of comparison becomes

irrelevant once we step outside the teleological developmental model in which

questions of size, linear continuity, and influence are viewed as the only measures

of historic importance and interest. More to the point is that the entire cultural-

literary context from which Arab Jewish and other non-Ashkenazi writers

emerged has been occluded from Hebrew literary discourse (as well as studies of

modern Jewish culture more generally). There is an unacknowledged history of


5/48


Arabic, Turkish, Persian). These writings need to be recovered, examined, and

contextualized within the social, political, and cultural trends and movements of

their own time and place.Due to numerous societal factors (e.g., censorship laws, lack of access to

printing, rapid cultural and political changes), nineteenth- and twentieth-century

Jewish writing in the Arab world, which is the focus of my own research,

progressed in fits and startsin different bursts, each of which had a different

character. There is thus no direct, seamless linkage between the activities of

writers in different moments (such as late nineteenth-century Cairo or 1940s

Baghdad), let alone between their writings and those of contemporary Mizrai

authors in Israel. Nonetheless, there are connections of sorts. In broad strokes,

the nineteenth-century modernization of the Middle Eastand the participation

of Jews thereincreated a set of social and cultural conditions that would facili--

tate the emergence of modern Arab writers, including the Jews among them.

Despite the lack of a direct connection between nineteenth- and twentieth-

century Jewish writing in the Arab world, in all instances the authors were

responding to the overarching imperative of cultural modernity. In this light, the

activities of nineteenth-century Jewish writers in the Arab world were part of a

larger, ongoing negotiation of cultural modernity that continued well into the

mid-twentieth century, and in which Jews participated in several fields (literature,

journalism, music, cinema, etc.).

Furthermore, although Arab Jewish and Mizrai writings from various historic

moments may not be linked directly to the writing of earlier moments, in all casesthey have responded to similar pressures and possibilities. First and foremost, all

the authors were or are members of a cultural minority (whether as Jews writing in

Arabic in a predominantly Muslim society, as Arab Jews participating in a Hebrew

enlightenment movement centered in Europe, or currently, as Mizraim working

under Ashkenazi sociocultural hegemony in Israel). They all have needed to make

certain choices in order to position themselves within the relevant cultural sphere or

movement (e.g., the Arabic literary renaissance, the Hebrew Haskalah,or contem--

porary Israeli literature). The texts produced in these various moments shed light on


6/48

132 y Lital Levy

influences available to them (from Hebrew, Arabic, and European languages and

cultures) into their writing, and how such choices have changed along with the

changing circumstances of production.Of the Mizrai authors currently writing in Israel, Ballas, as a scholar of

Arabic literature, probably makes the most overt usage of the Arabic literary heri--

tage in his works, basing characters upon historical figures such as the nineteenth-

century Egyptian Jewish writer Yaqub anu and the well-known Iraqi Jewish

convert to Islam, the historian Amad Sousa.13But second- and third-generation

Israelis continue to reimagine elements of the Levantine or Arab cultural pasts, as

in Ronit Matalons dialogue with the Anglophone Egyptian-Israeli writer Jacque--

line Kahanoff in Zeh im ha-panim eleynu (The One Facing Us; 1995) or Almog

Behars hallucinatory longings for his Iraqi Jewish grandfathers Arabic language

and culture in Ana min al-yahud (I Am One of the Jews; 2008). Such texts

demand a reassessment of the cultural worlds that contemporary Hebrew litera--

ture inhabits: worlds that merge Cairo with Tel Aviv, Baghdad with Jerusalem.14

Clearly, Mizrai literature is an Israeli cultural phenomenon, and yet these

creative manipulations of cultural residue, these hauntings of lost worlds, tie

much Mizrai writing to histories and contexts outside the purview of main--

stream Hebrew literary scholarship.

On this point, I reiterate and expand upon Ammiel Alcalays argument in

After Jews and Arabs. Alcalays groundbreaking book seeks to trace the develop--

ment and erosion of the qualities of mobility, diversity, autonomy, and translat--

ability possessed by the Jews of the Levant; in so doing, it examines relationshipsbetween Jews and Arabs in paradigmatic historical moments and encounters

and attempts to reinscribe Jews as native to the Levant.15 In its panoramic and

somewhat idiosyncratic sweep across time and space, the book focuses on two

historic moments: al-Andalus/Sepharad and the 1930spresent Israel/Palestine.16

The book is self-avowedly not a literary history, nor is its critique directed at

Hebrew literary historiography.17In recovering Arab Jewish source texts of the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in attempting to trace their

relationship to texts produced in other (European and non-European) centers of


7/48


Related questions of the myriad cultural influences informing Mizrai writing

await further exploration. In the pages that follow, I will consider the state of

Hebrew literary historiography in relation to Mizrai writing, suggest potentialdirections for revision, and then briefly outline the contours of modern Arab

Jewish textual production beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. I conclude

the essay with an analysis of a Hebrew poem written in Baghdad in 1920 and a

preliminary discussion of the cultural influences that have shaped the work of

Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas.

I . H E B R E W C A N O N F O R M A T I O N A N D M I Z R A H. I W R I T I N G

As early as 1997, Nancy Berg argued (perhaps somewhat prematurely) that

Sephardi [i.e., Sephardi and Mizrai] writers are redrawing the literary map,

whether claiming their rightful place in the existing canon, or contributing to a

new canon.19This observation would now seem to hold true at least for Michael

and Matalon, whose works are at the center of current Hebrew literary discourse.Nonetheless, while Mizrai writings are applauded as beacons of the pluralism or

multiculturalism of contemporary Hebrew writing, the discourse on the history

of Hebrew literature remains mostly unaltered. This is the case even in recent

studies of canon formation in Hebrew literature that explicitly adopt a revisionist

perspective and aim to disclose the ideological factors and power relations influ--

encing the canon selection.

For example, consider three English-language studies on Hebrew literaturethat appeared in 20022003, by Hannan Hever, Michael Gluzman, and Rachel

Feldhay Brenner. All three books make significant contributions to the field in

other ways, yet continue to exclude non-Ashkenazi writers from the narrative of

Hebrew literary history. Michael Gluzmans otherwise commendable 2003 book

on the politics of canonicity in modern Hebrew poetry (which focuses on the pre-

State period) draws attention to marginalized women and diasporic writers yet

says nothing about the question (or even the existence) of non-Ashkenazi

it 20 H P d i th M d H b C N ti B ildi d


8/48

134 y Lital Levy

Jewish (Mizrai) minority literary discourses, together with nonhegemonic

Ashkenazi Jewish literary discourses, play a significant role in the creation of the

national canon.21 But while the book devotes two full chapters to Palestinianwriters in Israel (Emile Habiby and Anton Shammas), the only Mizrai writer it

discusses is Shimon Ballas, who figures briefly in one chapter. 22The book gives

no attention to non-Ashkenazi writers either during the pre-State years or in the

statehood generation, so if indeed these writers played a role in the national

canon, they do not play a role in Hevers study thereof. However, in the newer,

Hebrew-language version, Ha-Sipur ve-ha-leom (Narrative and the Nation; 2007),

Hever addresses this imbalance by including additional chapters on Shami and

Burla (as well as a chapter on Matalon).23

In her bookInextricably Bonded (2003),Rachel Brenner also returns to forma--

tive moments in the story of Hebrew literature and Zionist thought, in this case

juxtaposing canonical male writers (S. Yizhar, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David

Grossman) with male Arab Israeli writers (Atallah Mansour, Habiby, Shammas) to

question the implicit separation of Jew and Arab. In her analysis, the interaction

between Jews and Arabs defies the Zionist concept of national identity based on

separation from the Arab and imitation of the enlightened European.24 Yet

Brenner does not consider what the Zionist dependency upon European recognition

and approval, and Israels ensuing emulation of the West, may have meant for a

large segment of the Jewish population of IsraelMizraim and Sephardim. The

Sephardi/Arab-Jewish past is elided, for instance, from Brenners evocation of the

impassioned objections of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, one of Tel Avivs founders, tothe Zionist myth of an empty land. While pointing out that Chelouches words

seem to anticipate post-Zionist thought, Brenner omits the information that is key

to understanding his apparently prescient position: Chelouche was the scion of an

important Sephardic family of Maghrebi origin and a member of a group of

Arabic-speaking Palestinian Jews (i.e., native Jews) that, while in favor of Jewish

settlement, envisioned a shared Arab-Jewish homeland.25If read within the historic

context of the Arabic-speaking native Jews, Chelouches viewpoint on main--

stream Ashkenazi Zionism appears neither exceptional nor surprising.


9/48


of non-Ashkenazi writers from the historiography, even if they themselves do not

rectify the problem.26LaorsAnu kotvim otakh moledet(We Write You, Homeland;

1995) does not discuss Mizrai writers but does include a brilliant critique of A. B.Yehoshuas conflicted treatment of Sephardi/Mizrai identity vis--vis Israeli iden--

tity.27 Schwartzs introduction to Mah she-roim mi-kan (The View from Here;

2005), Thoughts on a Hundred Years of Hebrew Literary Historiography, posits

that the most recent wave of historiography (from the 1980s to the present) is

indebted to postmodernist and postcolonial theory and committed to the recovery

of suppressed and marginalized voices ( la the minority discourse model),

including those of women, Mizrai, and Arab authors.28Nonetheless, Schwartzs

own subjects are primarily canonical, Ashkenazi male authors.

Finally, although this particular facet is not the focus of the current article,

the Hebrew novels and stories of native (Sephardi) Jews in the old Yishuv

constitute another understudied chapter of modern Hebrew literature. As Nancy

Berg notes: At the time writers such as Shaul Tchernichovsky and aim Bialik

were making Odessa the center for Hebrew literary activity, Yehuda Berla,

Yitzhak Shami, and Yaakov urgin (a little later) were writing in authentic native

voices in Eretz Yisrael (Palestine).29In his chapter on Shami in Ha-Sipur ve-ha-

leom, Hever locates him within a particularly complex politics of identity

whereby Shami was writing according to the accepted norms, which already

governed all Hebrew writing as the national Jewish literature, while expressing

an entirely different cultural perspective.30 Although Hevers chapter is a

welcome addition to the material on Shami, we still await a revisionist study ofHebrew literature at the time of state formation that holistically incorporates

Shami and Burla as well as other Palestinian Sephardi writers such as Shoshana

Shababo, and that accounts for their multiple cultural and linguistic influences.31

The exclusion of non-Ashkenazi Jewries from the historiography of Hebrew

literature parallels to the larger (and well-known) problem of their near-exclusion

from the historical narrative of the Jewish people propagated by the Israeli state

educational system.32However, given the indications of increasing willingness by

Hebrew literary scholars to acknowledge Mizrai voices, it seems that remaining


10/48

136 y Lital Levy

comparative literature have a long history of interaction in Israel (Tel Aviv

University even recently merged them into a single department), Arabic literature

remains sequestered within departments of Arabic and Islam, whose method--ological approaches are grounded in theology and philology rather than critical

theory and whose disciplinary perspective is insular rather than comparative.

Reuven Snir, a senior professor of Arabic literature at Haifa University, attributes

the exclusion of Arabic literature from comparative literary studies in Israel to the

deep-seated and abiding Eurocentrism of Israeli society:

As the roots of Jewish nationalism lie in Eastern Europe and the overall

orientation of modern Israeli canonical culture is predominantly

Ashkenazic and Western-oriented, no wonder that Arab culture has

been totally rejected by the dominant circles. There is no better illustra--

tion of this than the structure of the departments of Hebrew and

Comparative Literature at Israeli universities, where one can hardly find

tenured academic scholars of modern Hebrew literature or comparative

literature who have a knowledge of Arabic or have taken the trouble to

study the Arabic language and literature. Comparative studies can

legitimately be pursued in Russian, Italian, Japanese, Polish and, of

course, English, French and German, but hardly in Arabic literary

works in the original.33

Even though many Hebrew literary scholars may now be receptive to comparativework with Arabic, the structural division that persists within the Israeli academy

impedes the kind of comparative scholarship that could potentially open new

vistas in the study of Hebrew literature and its history.

It is thus perhaps not surprising that the growing body of scholarship on

contemporary Mizrai literature has broadened the critical perspective on Hebrew

literature and Israeli culture, but without revising Hebrew literary historiography or

engaging (pre-State) Arab Jewish intellectual and literary history.34Gershon Shaked

was criticized for characterizing the writings of first-generation Mizrai writers,


11/48


selves in it, they gave voice to their bitterness against the ruling groups).35In newer,

more theoretically sophisticated studies, however, Mizrai literature (when so

defined) is still read primarily for its oppositional qualities. Hever, in particular,initiated the study of Mizrai and Palestinian writing in Israel through the critical

lenses of minority writing and postcolonial theory, and even without knowledge of

Arabic or of the source texts of Arab culture, he succeeded in making Mizrai and

Palestinian authors a permanent facet of Israeli literary discourse. As has been

discussed in depth by Hever, Alcalay, and others, Mizrai writing offers a compel--

ling counter-narrative: a representation of Israeli culture, society, and identity that

contests the hegemonic AshkenaziZionist narrative.36 In this vein, subsequent

scholarship produced in Israel has remained focused on the formation and represen--

tation of Mizrai identity and experience in Israel, exploring important facets such

as literary representations of the Mizrai body or the maabarah(immigrant transit

camp).37Hebrew literary scholarship produced in the United States, where disci--

plinary borders are more flexible, has taken a somewhat broader temporal and

geographic perspective on Mizrai writing. Nancy Bergs pioneering book on Israeli

writers from Iraq, published in 1996, devotes a chapter to literature written by Jews

in Baghdad, thereby establishing some continuity between the Iraqi past and the

Israeli present.38Gil Hochbergs 2008 study, through not directly concerned with

Hebrew literary history, considers Arab Jewish identity outside the Israeli context

and juxtaposes Mizrai writing in Israel with North African writing in French. 39

Overall, however, in studies produced in both Hebrew and English, the criticism of

Mizrai writing in Israel remains largely fixated on its dialectical relationship toZionisman approach that ultimately reaffirms the centrality of Zionism to Israeli

cultural discourse. To broaden the discourse, we might begin by contemplating

some of the following questions: How can contemporary Mizrai writers be under--

stood or appreciated as historic subjects (and agents) in a context other than that of

the struggle for cultural determination in Israel? What might the Mizrai writer

bring to the proverbial table that isnota direct product of the encounter with Israe--

liness? How can we go beyondthe hermeneutics of hybridity in our reading of

Mizrai texts? Reading Mizrai literature comparatively, in conjunction with


12/48

138 y Lital Levy

T H E M A P O F H E B R E W L I T E R A T U R E A N D

J E W I S H W R I T I N G I N T H E E A S T

If by the 1940s budding Jewish writers in Baghdad such as Ballas and Michael were

fully engrossed in the expanding Arabic literary sphere to the exclusion of Hebrew,

this had not always been the case. To the contrary, from the mid-nineteenth century

through the first decades of the twentieth century, Jews in Baghdad and elsewhere

throughout the Arabic-speaking world were active participants in the revival of the

Hebrew language and creation of modern Hebrew letters. As I will discuss in more

detail shortly, while the Haskalah was experienced and expressed differently inEurope and the non-Ashkenazi world, an interconnected Hebrew revival did take

place in both spheres. I would thus begin the revision of Hebrew literary history

with a mutlilingual model of Haskalah that emphasizes reciprocal channels of

cultural circulation and transmission between Europe, Africa, and Asia. The

second phase of the revision should be a study of twentieth-century Jewish writing

in the Middle East that, again, is not restricted to Hebrew, but illuminates the role

of Hebrew writing within a dynamic and heteroglossic regional polysystem. My

proposed historic revision complements ongoing efforts to resituate the story of

modern Ashkenazi Hebrew writing within the polysystem of Hebrew, Yiddish, and

Russian and/or other European languages.40 Like many scholars of Hebrew and

Yiddish, I believe it makes little sense to study the development of Hebrew litera--

ture as though it were a national literature that developed in a predominantly mono--

lingual Hebrew environment beginning a century before there was a

Hebrew-speaking nation. Rather, I contextualize modern Hebrew within the

larger, heteroglossic cultural systems in which it developed, and read it through its

interactions with other languages and with cultural movements or ideological

trends. The comprehensive study of Jewish writing I advocate would thus be written

not as a single-stranded diachronic narrative, but as a cluster of synchronic strands

with some overlap. In other words, I see it not as a trajectory of linear development

(a connect-the-dots approach), but in the form of a messier, zigzagging picture in

which different cultural movements or trends overlapped and intersected, some


13/48


and Stephen Greenblatt, who question the national, monolingual model of literary

history, a model that has always been premised on ethnic and often linguistic

singularity, not to say purity.41These two phasesthe revision of theHaskalahnarrative as one of transregional circulation and the study of twentieth-century

Middle Eastern and North African Jewish thought and writingare necessary

steps toward the creation of an inclusive Hebrew literary and cultural history. 42

It is widely thought that the modern literary production of Middle Eastern

and North African Jewries was limited to traditional realms such as rabbinic or

liturgical genres (e.g., responsaandpiyyut), musar (ethical-devotional) literature,

and folklore. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish writers in the

East did in fact produce writing on worldly topics (journalistic essays, descriptive

ethnographies, stories, plays, etc.), they did not conceptualize their writing as

either religious or seculara categorical distinction that was not endemic to

their worldview. As Ammiel Alcalay notes, For contemporary Jewish literary

history, a number of other particular problems [in studying Levantine texts] exist.

Difficulties are often found in trying to fully reconcile writing that emerges from

a religious environment with writing that doesnt.43Hence, we should adjust our

expectations concerning such typologies of thought and writing before

approaching the texts in question. For the purposes of this essay, when I say

secular(for lack of a better term), I mean writing that falls outside the recognized

rabbinic and liturgical genres and does not carry the weight of religious authority.

If non-Ashkenazi Jewries did not read modernity as a crisis of tradition,

however, this does not mean that they were not aware of and engaged in activitieswe now associate with Jewish cultural modernity. Sephardi and Arab Jews are not

believed to have participated in the modern renaissance or enlightenment

movements of either Hebrew or Arabic, known respectively as the Haskalah and

the Naha. In fact, Jews in communities throughout the Middle East, North

Africa, and India played active roles in both movements. I believe their contribu--

tions have been obscured largely because the histories of these movements were

absorbed into the respective narratives of Zionism and Arab nationalism, neither

of which could accommodate Arab Jews or their viewpoints on topics such as


14/48

140 y Lital Levy

century, in places like Baghdad, Beirut, and Cairo, Jewish intellectuals wrote in

Hebrew and Arabic on seminal topics ranging from linguistic and cultural revival

to the Dreyfus affair to womens rights to Egyptian independence. A few exam--ples of their writings include a Hebrew newspaper published in Baghdad begin--

ning in 1863, a 1903 Arabic-language biography of mile Zola, and a 1909

Arabic-language elucidation of the Talmud written for a mainstream Arab read--

ership.44 Nineteenth-century Jewish writers also published plays, poetry, and a

handful of short stories in Hebrew and Arabic.45

Works in Hebrew and standard Arabic, however, form a small part of modern

Middle Eastern Jewish literary production. By contrast, the outpouring of Judeo-Arabic literature from the same period was enormous. Until the twentieth century,

most literate Jewish men and women in the Arabic-speaking world learned to read

only in Hebrew characters, but knowledge of Hebrew itself was reserved for the

educated elite. If we split the phenomenon of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century writing of Arab Jews into its three linguistic strands, namely Judeo-Arabic,

Hebrew, and standard (also called literary or classical Arabic; i.e.,fua), we find

that the quantity of Judeo-Arabic texts easily outnumbers both Hebrew and stan--

dard Arabic.46Of course, each language also performed a different function within

the polysystem: Judeo-Arabic was the language of popular literature, Hebrew the

medium of maskilic-style literature, and standard Arabic the domain of a small

group of intellectuals.47In this respect, the role of Judeo-Arabic in the Middle East

parallels that played by Yiddish in Europe. Indeed, the triad of Hebrew, Judeo-

Arabic, and standard Arabic was quite similar to that formed by Hebrew, Yiddish,and standard European languages. In Turkey and the Balkans, Judeo-Spanish

constituted an element of the literary polysystem, and in the nineteenth century a

large amount of translation activity took place between Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-

Arabic as materials were transmitted back and forth between the Ladino and

Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire; for instance, large

sections ofMe-am loez,the mid-eighteenth-century encyclopedia of Bible stories

and folktales, were translated from Judeo-Spanish into Judeo-Arabic.48 Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish folk literature and musar literature thus constituted the


15/48


The popularity of Judeo-Arabic printing, coupled with the emergence of

Hebrew periodical literature in Europe, seems to have encouraged the growth of

secular reading sensibilities and the consumption of print culture among Jewishreaders in the East. In this period, a particularly popular subgenre of Judeo-

Arabic literature emerged in the form of long novelistic narratives about biblical

characters (prophets, kings, queens, and heroes), compiled from a mixture of

canonical Jewish and Islamic sources and translated from the original Hebrew

and Arabic. One such narrative, Qiat Yusuf al-adiq (The Story of Joseph the

Righteous), a novel of more than one hundred pages, was originally printed in

Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic in Calcutta, and reprinted in Baghdad in 1892. It enjoyed

such widespread circulation that it was reprinted yet again in both Aden and

North Africa, at either extreme of the Arab world. This type of narrative litera--

ture may have acted as a bridge between traditional Jewish literary genres and the

European novels then making forays into the Jewish world via Hebrew transla--

tion. During this period, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Judeo-

Arabic and Judeo-Spanish also acquired a new function as the languages of

modern periodicals.49In the Arab Jewish context, it is noteworthy that Iraqi Jews

residing in Bombay and Calcutta printed newspapers in Judeo-Arabic continu--

ously from 1856 (the same year Ha-Magid was founded) until 1902. The

periodicals editors, many of whom were also the owners and operators of Hebrew

presses, translated stories and novellas from Hebrew and European languages and

published them serially in their journals, sometimes reprinting them as bound

anthologies. These translations bear witness to the circulation of Jewish literarytexts between the European and non-European Jewish worlds. For instance,

Avraham Mapus Ahavat Tsiyon (The Love of Zion; 1853) appeared in Judeo-

Arabic in Tunis in the 1890s and again in Calcutta in 1896, and once more in

Judeo-Persian in 1908. In Anatolia, both Hebrew and Yiddish literatures

(including the works of Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, and Sholem Asch) were

translated into Judeo-Spanish.50

The 1896 edition of Ahavat Tsiyon was translated and printed by an Iraqi

Jewish maskil, Rav Shlomo Twena, owner and operator of the Calcutta Hebrew


16/48

142 y Lital Levy

or 1901), which featured a literary supplement (Magid mishneh).51His transla--

tions from Hebrew to Judeo-Arabic include Ludwig Philippsons Sefer tsadik nosea

and Sefer tsadik ve-nisgav (translated to Hebrew from the original German byMeir Estarinski and Naum Sokolov),as well as the immensely popular Gothic

novelMisterey pariz(Les mistres de Paris) by Eugne Sue (translated into Hebrew,

possibly via German or Russian, by the Vilna maskil Kalman Schulman and

published in installments between 1857 and 1860).52 Earlier, in 1863, another

Baghdadi maskil named Barukh Moshe Mizrai had established the first modern

printing press in Baghdad: a lithographic Hebrew press, which he used to print a

Hebrew newspaper, Ha-Dover. Published intermittently through 1871 (printing

was subject to license by the reluctant Ottoman authorities), Ha-Dover was in

direct dialogue (and competition) with Hebrew newspapers from both Europe

and the East, indeed reprinting some of its material from other Hebrew and

Judeo-Arabic newspapers such as Ha-Magid, Ha-Levanon, and Doresh Tob le-

ammo. Some of its foreign news was translated into Hebrew from the French

newspapers Le Telegraphand Le Rpublique.53

While literature was not its primary focus, Ha-Doverdid feature occasional

literary items. For instance, a story with the rather voluminous title The

Chronicles of Don Yosef Ben Efraim: A Lovely and Even Pleasant Tale of the

Events That Took Place in the Land of Spain in the City of Castille in the

Fifteenth Century, Written and Published in the Language of Ashkenaz [Yiddish

or German] and Translated into Hebrew was printed in Ha-Levanon and then

republished serially in Ha-Dover.54

Ha-Dover attributed the storys origins to amanuscript in the language of Ashkenaz, a claim it reiterated in a later

installment.55 However, the story is actually a rewriting of the Chronicle of

Alfonso XI from Solomon ibn Vergas sixteenth-century Shevet Yehudah (The

Scepter of Judah).56 The chain of transmission of this rewriting thus leads us

from a Hebrew manuscript written by a Sephardi exile in sixteenth-century

Turkey to a later Yiddish version, which was then retranslated back into Hebrew

in nineteenth-century Jerusalem and reprinted once again in a Hebrew newspaper

in Baghdad. Paper trails of this sort, while constituting fascinating stories in and


17/48


None of this material, however, informs the historiography of the Hebrew

Haskalah, which is viewed as the product of what might be dubbed the long

nineteenth century (1770s1890s) of European Jewry.57The literary geographyof the Haskalahshould in fact be identical with the global map of Jewish life, for

by the close of the nineteenth century there was hardly a community that had not

been touched in some way by the Hebrew revival and its modernizing agenda.

Maskilic circles congregated in places as distant from Europe as Persia and

Yemen, while Jews in Iraq and Tunisia contributed to the European Hebrew press

from its very inception.58Places including Erdine, Calcutta, Baghdad, Mogador

while each distinct in its own admixture of historical circumstance, linguistic and

cultural influenceswere all contact points in the global network of the Jewish

enlightenment. I thus suggest re-envisioning the Haskalah as an interregional

(global) movement with channels of transmission (e.g., the Hebrew press,

literary translations) that crisscrossed Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Further--

more, because much of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings

produced in these areas continued to reflect the ideational paradigms and themes

of the Haskalah rather than those of the Teiyah (i.e., enlightenment and reform

rather than national revival), the temporal limits of Haskalah should be extended

beyond its conventional cutoff of 1882 and into the twentieth century.

That said, simply expanding the Haskalahstemporal and geographic bound--

aries is not sufficient. Revising the historic narrative of modern Jewish culture

involves more than adding new centers of activity to the existing map. Above all,

it entails reassessing the historic background and relationships that come withthis new territory. My proposed model of Haskalah is global not only in a

geographic but also in an epistemological sense, for it suggests that Haskalahwas

produced both by and through processes of cultural (and cross-cultural) circula--

tion.59Admittedly, at this early stage of research, the global view is still largely

conjectural; but future research will determine the full extent of the circulation

of Jewish texts. Thus, rather than studying individual cultural centers in the East

in an isolated manner, I suggest researching the intellectual contacts that were

forged between and among all these communities, as well as their dialogue with


18/48

144 y Lital Levy

system, underwent transcultural and intercultural permutations (the aforemen--

tioned reworking of Shevet Yehudahin Ha-Doverbeing only one such example).60

Only then will we be able to accurately reconstruct a Hebrew modernity thatdeveloped through reciprocal EastWest channels of influence, within a linguistic

and cultural polysystem comprised not only of the accepted triad of Hebrew,

Yiddish, and European languages, but also of the literary languages ( Jewish and

standard) of the Middle East.61In particular, the cultural connections between

Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) and Judeo-Arabic, or between standard Arabic and

Judeo-Arabic, are still uncharted but potentially fertile scholarly terrain.

H E B R E W - A R A B I C I N T E R C U L T U R A L I T Y :

T H E H A S K A L A H A N D T H E N A H DA

In studying cultural connections, of course, we should consider not only the circu--

lation of ideas and texts throughout different parts of the Jewish world, but the

interaction of (non-Jewish) regional discourses with Jewish writing. The mid-to-

late nineteenth century was a period of intense and explicit negotiation with moder--

nity for both

Hebrew and Arabic cultures as they underwent concurrent processes

of cultural renewal. The Hebrew Haskalah and Teiyah are well-known to this

journals readers, and will need no definitional elaboration here. The modern Arabic

renaissance, al-naha al-arabiyya, is presumably less familiar. From an Arabic term

also connoting revival,62

the Naharefers to the cluster of intertwined projects oflinguistic, literary, cultural, social, and religious reform carried out by Arab intel--

lectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily in Beirut and

Cairo. The two main channels of the movement, literary revival and Islamic

modernism/reform, were connected through their common experience in

constructing and utilizing the emerging public sphere. Epistemologically, the

Naha shared much with the Haskalah. Both were fundamentally responses to

Enlightenment thought and the globalization of modernity. Like the Haskalah,theNaha was far from a single coherent movement. For one, it was interregional, with


19/48


religion and technology, and social and political thought. While the parallels

between these movements are numerous and fascinating, our primary concern here

rests with the Arab Jewish writers who participated in them.As noted, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Haskalahreached

virtually every sizable Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa.

At this time maskilic writing in the mashriq (aside from Palestine) was produced

largely in Iraq, by modernizing rabbis (rabbanim maskilim) such as Barukh Moshe

Mizrai and Shlomo Bekhor uin.63 In their letters and essays, these rabbis

presented the enlightened face of their communities, declaring that they too

desired Haskalah, but on their own terms, not necessarily the same terms

promoted by European maskilim.In the view of the modernizing rabbis, Haskalah

and faith, science and Torah, went hand in hand, and so these figures strongly

promoted educational reforms in the community, such as the teaching of foreign

languages and of crafts (although such reforms should not be confused with secu--

larization). They also sought to weed out superstition and to restore religion to its

true principlesindeed, much the same agenda then being promoted in Islamic

reform circles. In 1885, a Baghdad-born Jew named Sliman Menaem Mani, of the

famous Mani family in Hebron, published a fictionalized critique of superstition in

Eleazar Ben-Yehudas newspaper Ha-Tsevi. Called Emek ha-Shedim, Manis story

is for now the only known example of Hebrew prose fiction by an Arab Jew in the

nineteenth century, although I would venture to guess that there are other examples

awaiting (re)discovery.64Examples of modern poetry, on the other hand, abound.65

Notably, Slimans Menaem Manis brother Avraham Barukh Mani composedexcellent Hebrew poetry in the style of the Italian Haskalah.

Even as these Hebrew writings were being penned in Baghdad and Palestine

during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Naha was underway in

Beirut and Cairo. What is particularly important to note is that the Naha was a

regional movement whose reverberations, particularly the themes of reform and

modernity, were carried to the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire, and were

sounded in all its languages. Thus while figures such as uin and Mani were

well aware of the Haskalah activity then centered in Europe, we ought not assume


20/48

146 y Lital Levy

lingual historiographies). It is plausible, rather, that Arabic-speaking maskilim

may have viewed the Haskalah and Naha activities to which they were privy as

complementary manifestations of a transregional (even universal) zeitgeist ofEnlightenment. Indeed, much of the Haskalahwriting produced in the East is so

similar in theme and tone to Nahawriting as to suggest an implicit cross-

pollination of the ideas circulating throughout the region with ideas emanating

from the European Hebrew press.

At the same time, a small number of Jewish intellectuals participated directly

in the Naha through literary activity in Arabic. It is widely believed that with

the notable exception of the Egyptian Jewish playwright and journalist Yaqub

anu, Jews in this period (roughly the 1860s through World War I) did not write

in literary Arabic.66 In actuality, there were at least a dozen or so active Jewish

writers of Arabic in Beirut and Cairo during this period, and very many more

readers, some of whom contributed occasional letters to prominent Arabic-

language cultural journals such as al-Hilal(The Crescent) and al-Muqtaaf (The

Selected).67Although these numbers sound tiny, it should be remembered that

even the prominent Christian and Muslim writers of Arabic in this period

numbered no more than a few dozen. In any case, the point at hand is not that

Jews had a major influence on the Arabic literary renaissance, but rather, that the

Arabic movement exerted an influence on themdemonstrating that the Jewish

communities of the mashriq were not impervious to modern cultural trends at

work in their greater societies, as has typically been thought.68

When and why did Jews begin using literary Arabic? Although there is a well-established precedence for Jews composing Arabic letters during the pre-Islamic

period as well as in the Golden Age of Sepharad/al-Andalus, in later centuries,

from the Spanish expulsion through the Arabic revival in the nineteenth century,

literary Arabic was used but sparingly by Jews. With the educational and social

reforms of the late nineteenth-century Levant, a small but growing number of Jews

in Egypt, Syria, and slightly later, Iraq, began to take advantage of the new educa--

tional opportunities proffered by the Alliance Isralite Universelle, by Christian

missionary schools, by new state schools and colleges, and by a handful of modern


21/48


in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, strongly promoted Arabic

language and culture. Some of the graduates of these schools came to identify with

mainstream Arabic culture and became active in the Naha.Prominent examplesof this type of modern Arab Jewish intellectual include the Egyptian Karaite

lawyer and poet Murad Farag, the Beirut-born writer and journalist Esther Azhari

Moyal, her husband Shimon Moyal of Jaffa, their son Abdallah Ovadia Nadim

Moyal, and his contemporary Nissim Malul, a native of Sefad. Notably, all these

figures lived for some time in either Beirut or Cairo, or both. Collectively, they left

behind a fascinating trail. Between the 1890s and 1950, Murad Farag published a

few dozen books on legal topics as well as four volumes of original poetry in Arabic

and one volume in Hebrew, Ha-Kodshiyot.69At the turn of the century he also wrote

and edited a newspaper in standard Arabic for the Karaite community. Esther

Moyal, an intellectual far ahead of her time and a lifelong advocate of womens

rights, printed a newspaper for Egyptian women between 1899 and 1904, and later

helped her husband Shimon run a short-lived Arabic-language newspaper in Jaffa.

Moved by Zolas pivotal role in the Dreyfus affair, in 1903 she published an Arabic-

language biography of the French writer (some of whose novels she had previously

translated into Arabic). Her opinions on AshkenaziSephardi relations in the

Yishuv were also voiced in the Palestinian Hebrew newspaper Ha-Tsevi.In addition

to Farag and the Moyals, a handful of other figures published books in Arabic, and

numerous other Jewish readers contributed letters to the aforementioned Arabic

cultural journals.

Although much of the literary production of nineteenth-century Arab Jewishintellectuals has doubtless been lost, even its vestiges demonstrate that the Naha

encompassed not only Muslims and Christians, but all the religious communities

in the region, including the Jews. They also attest to the fact that Jews were not

excluded from the emerging public sphere that prefigured the rise of Arab nation--

alism. In short, the participation of Arab Jews in the Naha as well as in the

Haskalah illustrates their engagement with cultural modernity. As these two

movementsran their course in the region, and their twin nodes of enlightenment

and reform were increasingly supplanted by the powerful tropes of the nation and


22/48

148 y Lital Levy

B A G H D A D I J E W S A N D C U L T U R A L M O D E R N I T Y : B A T B A V E L

Let us now turn to the specific case of Baghdadi Jews. In the nineteenth century,

Baghdad was still a conservative, traditional city on the periphery of Naha

activity.Although the cultural journals issuing from Beirut and Cairo did find

subscribers in Baghdad, and there is anecdotal evidence that some members of

the Jewish community may have read Arabic-language journals such as al-

Muqtaaf, thus far I have found no record of nineteenth-century Baghdadi Jewish

readers writing letters to these journals or publishing their own works in standard

Arabic. However, in the late nineteenth century, with the establishment of asuccession of presses, Baghdad became a major center of Hebrew printing in the

East.70The community also began a program of educational reform beginning in

the 1860s which, by the first decade of the twentieth century, began producing a

particular type of modern Arab Jewish intellectual: one doubly conversant in

Hebrew learning and in Arabic and/or Ottoman culture.71

Following the Young Turk revolt in 1908, Turkish and Arabic enjoyed a brief

flowering in the Jewish community, whose members produced a handful of news--

papers and even a few books in those languages. This incipient process was inter--

rupted during World War I, when the Ottomans halted publishing and

conscripted Jews into their army. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire,

the end of Turkish rule, and the commencement of the British mandate, the

Jewish community of Baghdad underwent an accelerated process of cultural

modernization and secularization. Furthermore, in its early years during the

1920s, the newly established Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq strongly emphasized an

inclusive local nationalism for all its inhabitants, and promoted the teaching of

Arabic language and culture as a unifying measure. The new national mood,

combined with the prominent British presence, led the Jewish community simul--

taneously toward Western and Arab cultural influences, so that Baghdadi Jews

acquired knowledge both of literary Arabic and of European languages; even as

they became more Western in their cultural tastes and attitudes, they also became

more and more integrated into the emerging Iraqi public sphere.72


23/48


Iraqi Jewish intellectuals began to emerge. Figures such as Murad Mikhail, Mir

Bari, Anwar Shaul, Yaqub Bilbul, and Shalom Darwish penned Arabic verse and

wrote precursors of the modern short story in Iraq. Shaul, an Iraqi patriot whoremained in Baghdad until 1971, was the first editor of al-Miba (Ha-Menorah,

19241929), an Arabic-language Jewish newspaper published in Baghdad; in 1929

he became publisher of the important literary weekly al-aid (The Reaper). As

Orit Bashkin has demonstrated, al-Miba tried to advocate a double-stranded

Zionist and Iraqi-nationalist agenda; it covered the activities of Zionist leaders in

Palestine while printing patriotic Iraqi poems by Jewish writers (a dual orientation

that was possible only during the 1920s).73At the same time, the journal also played

a role in the history of modern Iraqi literature by providing a forum for some of the

first short stories published in Iraq.

The entry of Iraqi Jews into Arabic literature in the 1920s was accompanied by

a brief rebirth of modern Hebrew writing in Baghdad, partly influenced by contacts

between the community and the Yishuv and by the dispatching of modern Hebrew

teachers to Iraq.74 The Hebrew cultural option was epitomized by a short-lived

bilingual Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic cultural journal, Yeshurun, produced by a

Zionist association called Agudat Ivrit Sifrutit or in Arabic, al-Jamiyya al-

Israiliyya al-Adabiyya (in English, the Baghdad Hebrew Literary Society). Led

initially by Shlomo iyya (who was murdered in 1920) and then Salman Shina

(later, the publisher of al-Miba), the group apparently had several hundred

members at its peak.75In 19201921, it produced five issues of the journal.

Yeshuruns first editionreflects a transitional moment for Iraqi Jewry, one inwhich the community stood at a cultural crossroads. Would it embrace the path

of Iraqi independence and Arab identity, turn toward European horizons, or,

invoking its identity as the oldest Jewish diaspora, choose Hebrew nationalism?

The patriotic Iraqi route proved the most popular, at least until late in the 1940s.

Nonetheless, the members of the Hebrew literary society believed that the invet--

erate Iraqi Jewish community had a special and necessary role to play in the

Hebrew cultural revival, and sought to expound it in their publication. In its inau--

gural issue, Yeshurun defined itself as a literary, social, and historical newspaper


24/48

150 y Lital Levy

One didactic poem that appears in the first issue seems to encapsulate the

newspapers message and tenor, but also (perhaps unwittingly) reveals the extent of

the cultural Arabization of educated Iraqi Jewry in this period. Entitled Bat Bavel(Daughter of Babylon), the poem was penned by a writer and educator named Salim

(Shlomo) Yiaq Nissim. The late scholar of Iraqi Jewry Avraham Ben-Yaakov

describes him as one of the progressive maskilimof Baghdad who worked in the

fields of education, law, and the judiciary. Nissim published two books in Judeo-

Arabic (1907 and 1910), followed by two volumes in Hebrew: Leka tov(A Good

Lesson; 1912), an instructional book for students of Hebrew, and Derekh tovim

(The Way of the Righteous; 1938), a collection of his shirey musar (didactic poems).77

He also published four poems in Yeshurunduring the journals short run.

Nissims first poem for the journal invokes an old biblical persona, Bat Bavel,

but he retrofits it with a new identity. Bat Bavel appears in Prophets as a harlot, a

fallen woman, who, representing the ancient Babylonian kingdoms that oppressed

the Israelites, has incurred Gods wrath and will be brought down and humili--

ated.78 (Another well-known biblical daughter is Bat Tsiyon, the Daughter of

Zion, a collocation used throughout the Bible and liturgical tradition to represent

Israel.) In the poem, Bat Bavelundergoes a transvaluation; far from representing

the conquering, rapacious Babylonian enemy, this new daughter of Babylon

symbolizes the modern-day Babylonian Jews. The poem thus replaces Daughter

of Zion with Daughter of Babylon as the personification of Jewish collective

identity. Indeed, the poem in its entirety is addressed to this daughter in the

imperative, beginning Uri bat bavel em ha-talmud (Awake, daughter of Babylon,mother of the Talmud!) and continuing,

Return to your ancient past

Aid your sister with education and culture

And the people of Israel will once more be a nation.

Awake, daughter of Babylon, mother of knowledge

Take up in your hand the pen of literatureCast ignorance behind you


25/48


Undo the cuffs, release the binds,

Those tethers of dormant beliefs,

Gather lilies and flowersFrom the field of the patriarchs land.

Show [your] strength in knowledge of languages and the sciences

But turn not away from the Prophets

Open the Book of Chronicles

And know the greatness of Israel amongst nations.

Exiled daughter of BabylonAbandon not the language of [our] parents,

Teach your language, Hebrew,

Lest you be scorned amongst the nations.

Take Yeshurun in hand [or: Take Israel by the hand]

And become a blooming bud

With the courage of Yehoshua Bin Nun.

Find yourself spiritual repose.

The original Hebrew reads as follows:

.

.

,


26/48

152 y Lital Levy

.

.

-

.

The poems opening line encapsulates its striking Arabic-Hebrew intercul--

turality. It seems an obvious al lusion to Yehuda Leib Gordons seminal 1863 poem

Hakitsah, ami, which begins, Hakitsah, ami! Ad matay tishanah? (Awake,

my people! How long will you slumber?)but it resonates equally with the nine--

teenth-century Lebanese writer Ibrahim al-Yazijis famous line Intabihu wa-

istafiqu ya-ahl al-arab (Arise, oh Arab people, and awake!), which in turn was

later adopted as the epigraph of The Arab Awakening, George Antoniuss classic

history of Arab nationalism, published in 1938.79The theme of awakening, only

one of the many tropes common to Naha and Haskalah discourses, was preva--lent throughout the regional literatures of the former Ottoman Empire from the

mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The speakers exhortation of the

Daughter of Babylon to return to her ancient past, likewise, echoes the rhet--

oric of the Salafiyya movement within Islamic modernism, which called for a

return to the pure past of early Islaman idea propagated by a number of Iraqi

writers, including Nissims contemporary, the great Iraqi poet Jamil idqi al-

Zawahi.80 In fact, the ideational thrust of the poem seems even closer to the

discourse of the Naha than to that of the Haskalah Lev Hakaks analysis of the


27/48


28/48

154 y Lital Levy

of the Arabic umma (nation, in the sense of a community), which was frequently

evoked in the Arabic writing of the time.In the third stanza, Nissim calls upon

Bat Bavel to Undo the cuffs, / release the binds / Those tethers of dormantbeliefs and to Gather lilies and flowers from the land of the patriarchs.

However, this directive is both preceded and followed by injunctions to study

language and literature (especially Hebrew), implying that the said flowers are

themselves the buds of such knowledge. The first line of the last stanza, which

puns on Yeshurun(both the title of the periodical and a euphemism for Israel) rein--

forces the implied message that the greatness of Israel, to which Bat Bavel must

aspire, is in fact its knowledge. Thus, although the poem voices a kind of cultural

nationalism, it seems to advocate a spiritual rather than a physical return.

In its cultural nationalism, this poem complements Yeshurunsopening edito--

rial manifesto. Bat Bavel is addressed not to the Jewish people in its entirety (as

is Gordons poem), but rather to theIraqiJewish community; it evokes the great--

ness of Israels past, but within that history, it singles out the special contribution

of Babylonian Jews as the creators of the Talmud, and it calls upon the commu--

nity to revive that role and reassume cultural and intellectual leadership within

the Jewish world. As such, the poem can be read either as an assimilation of

Naha ideas into a Hebrew-cultural Zionist framework, or as an assimilation of

Haskalah ideas into an Iraqi Jewish framework. Indeed, it is not unlikely that

Nissim, who would have absorbed both of these discourses through his exposure

to Arabic and Hebrew writing, was applying them both (whether consciously or

unconsciously) to his poetic call to action.

T H E P O S T H I S T O R Y O F T H E P R E H I S T O R Y :

M I C H A E L A N D B A L L A S A S A R A B I C - H E B R E W W R I T E R S

The modern Hebrew cultural experiment in Iraq, epitomized by Yeshurun,was ulti--

mately short-lived. Indeed, during the three ensuing decades before the communi--tys disintegration in 19501951, most Jewish writers immersed themselves in


29/48


exactly in the manner he advocated. The turn away from the Hebrew cultural

option and toward Arabic may have been due in part to Iraqi government restric--

tions on Hebrew instruction in independent Iraq, post-1932.82 More generally,however, it reflects the integrationist path taken by the majority of Iraqi Jews in the

years leading up to and following Iraqs independence. Sami Michaels writings in

Arabic are indicative of the sweeping cultural Arabization of Iraqi Jews, which

reached its apex during those three decades. By the end of that period, most young,

acculturated writers such as Michael and Ballas would have absorbed very little, if

anything, from Hebrew literature and culture. Rather, they were products of the

Arabic cultural scene and of world literature, which they read either in Arabic

translation or in the original French or English (Ballas, for example, was schooled

at the Baghdad Alliance,and later pursued studies at the Sorbonne).

Reuven Snir has written extensively on Iraqi Jewish writers of Arabic. Of the

generation to make the transition from Iraq to Israel, he notes:

Sooner or later Iraqi-Jewish writers who emigrated to Israel were

confronted with the stark choice in which language they should write

and communicate, that is, whether to continue to write in Arabic or to

adapt to their new cultural surroundings and make the required shift in

their aesthetic preference and start writing in Hebrew, in the hope of

finding a new audience.

The writers who succeeded in adapting to writing in Hebrew

adopted gradually the poetic [sic]of Hebrew literature and most of themalso the Zionist narrative, while they have been still insisting on

retaining various degrees of relationship to Arab culture.83

This is a succinct analysis of the situation of the first generation of Jewish writers

from the Arab world. Eli Amir and Sami Michael (in certain of his works) have

by and large adopted the Zionist narrative, eliciting tempered criticism of Israels

immigration and absorption policies but not of the ideological premises of

Zionism themselves; this might be termed bikoret be-havanah, a forgiving or


30/48

156 y Lital Levy

as the Israeli-born Dorit Rabinyan) to occasionally exoticize their depictions of

Iraq and Iran.85Other writers (particularly Ballas, but also Michael in his new

novel Aidah), produce texts such that challenge the Israeli reader to venture faroutside his or her cultural, geographical, and ideological comfort zones. 86A third

option was realized by the Iraqi Jewish author Samir Naqqash, who never made

the transition to Hebrew at all, publishing his entire oeuvre in Arabic; Naqqash

was thereby able to retain autonomy from the Zionist meta-narrative, although he

paid the price by forfeiting his readership.87

When questioned about literary models and influences during his formative

years in Iraq, Ballas noted the Arabic works of the leading Egyptian writer Taha

usayn (18891973) and Lebanese American poet Jubran Khalil Jubran (1883

1931) in addition to the strong influence of French literature, which he read in the

original.88In Iraq, Ballas viewed himself as an aspiring Iraqi writer, but he was

also conscious of the challenge he faced as a Jew integrating into a mainly non-

Jewish cultural milieu. Even then he knew of the previous generation of Iraqi

Jewish writers of Arabic, such as Shalom Darwish and Yaqub Bilbul; while their

works did not serve him as models, their early successes in the literary field

encouraged him. (Ballas adds that he was unaware that Iraqi Jews ever wrote

modern Hebrew, or that Jews participated in the nineteenth-century Naha.)

After arriving in Israel, he acquired literary Hebrew through a studious reading

of the works of S.Y. Agnon.89His encounter with Agnon began with Orea natah

la-lun (A Guest for the Night); although the novels cultural content was

completely foreign to him, he recognized the musicality of the languageaquality which he says he had also appreciated in the works of Taha usayn, and

consciously tried to imitate in his own Arabic prose.

As for Sami Michaels early influences, he heavily stresses that his formative

reading experiences were of world literature in Arabic translation (primarily the

popular editions issuing from publishing houses in Cairo), rather than local

Arabic writers; in the 1940s, Iraqi literature was still in what he calls infantile

stages.90 As opposed to Ballas, Michael says that while living in Iraq he was

unaware of the literary activities of the previous generation of Iraqi Jews. His first


31/48


Michaels outlook on literature and writing in Iraq was heavily influenced by his

communist activity; he describes his formative cultural influences as Marxist

universalist. Indeed, only much later, in the 1970s and 1980s, while he hadalready been living in Israel for decades, was he exposed to major Arabic writers

such as the Egyptians Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idris. In the 1970s, he trans--

lated some of Mahfouzs works into Hebrew.

Upon arrival in Israel, Michael initially wrote and published in Arabic. A

twenty-year gap stretched between the cessation of his Arabic literary activity

and the appearance of his first novel in Hebrew.91In fact, the first draft of Shavim

ve-shavim yoter(Equal and More Equal; 1974), Michaels first Hebrew novel, waswritten in Arabic in the 1950s, but never published.92However, Michael believes

that the slow, painstaking process of learning to write in Hebrew as a second

language also conferred certain advantages. In his view, because non-native

Hebrew writers such as himself and Ballas were not burdened by a long literary

tradition but rather sprang up within a new and cosmopolitan cultural scene, the

cultural sensibility of their Hebrew writing is freer and more universal than that

of their Ashkenazi predecessors.

Given that he is the leading Hebrew writer from an Arabic-speaking country,

where might we say Sami Michael comes from? The map of his literary and

cultural influences and sources must include Baghdad and Cairo as well as Russia,

France, and England, and of course Tel Aviv and Haifa. In another sense, however,

he also comes from a city in which Jews had been producing modern Hebrew,

Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic writing since the mid-nineteenth century. The historiesof Arab Jewish participation in the Haskalah and Naha tell us that figures like

Michael and Ballas did not arrive on the Israeli literary scene from a historical

vacuum. To be sure, the different writers and texts presented in this essay do not

constitute a genealogy of Mizrai writing in the sense of a straightforward,

continuous narrative of predecessors, followers, and a chain of influence.

Collectively, however, they demonstrate that at different times and places, Arab

Jews embraced the opportunity to participate in the modern cultural life of theirbroader Arab societies or of the global Jewish community, or both. Texts such as


32/48

158 y Lital Levy

Nissims 1920 Bat Bavel, and the short stories of Darwish and Bilbul call for a

remapping of the cultural roots of Jewish modernity, and furnish a sense of the

cultural milieus in which Arab Jewish intellectuals operated. As for the Hebrewtexts in particular, their relationships to Arabic and Judeo-Arabic impel us to

reconsider the exclusion of those languages (and other Jewish languages) from the

purview of Hebrew literary history. That said, these observations and suggestions

should be read as points of departure; doubtless there is yet much more to be

discerned from reading the story of modern Hebrew as viewed from the East.

Harvard Society of Fellows / Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

N O T E S

I would like to thank Kfir Cohen, Karen Grumberg, Shaul Setter, Ilana Szobel,

Chana Kronfeld, and especially the anonymous reviewer of Prooftextsfor their

helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. All translations are mine

unless otherwise indicated.1 Sami Michael, Victoria,trans. Dalya Bilu (London: Macmillan, 1995), 19596; for

Hebrew, see Sami Michael, Viktoryah(Tel Aviv: Am oved, 1993), 17576.

2 Forget Baghdad: Jews and ArabsThe Iraqi Connection. Dir. Samir, Zurich 2002.

3 Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is considered one of the most important Islamic intellectuals

and activists of the nineteenth century and was the mentor of Muammad Abduh,

the figurehead of the Islamic reform movement. Al-Afghani was born in Afghani--

stan in 1838 and was trained as a religious scholar. At age eighteen. he left Afghani--stan for a lifetime of wanderings through India, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt,

and France. He died in 1897 under unclear circumstances. He is remembered,

among much else, for his debate with the French philosopher Ernest Renan

concerning the compatibility of Islam with modern thought and science.

4 See also n. 34, below, for more reactions by Ballas to Israels lack of basic knowledge

of Arab culture and society.

5 The New, est. 1953.6 See, for instance, Eli Amir,Mafria ha-yonim (The Pigeon Keeper) (Tel Aviv: Am


33/48


writing and the transition from Iraq to Israel, and subsequently from Arabic to

Hebrew, at length in Arabs of the Mosaic Faith: Jewish Writers in Modern Iraq

and the Clash of Narratives after their Immigration to Israel, inPoetrys Voice,Societys Norms: Forms of Interaction between Middle Eastern Writers and Their

Societies, eds. Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler (Wiesbaden: Reichert

Verlag Wiesbaden, 2006), 14971. A similar (almost identical) version also

appeared earlier in Snir, Forget Baghdad! The Clash of Literary Narratives

among Iraqi-Jews in Israel, Orientalia SuecanaLIII (2004): 14363. For a

comprehensive study of Arabic-language works by Iraqi Jews, see idem, Araviyut,

yahadut, tsiyonut: maavak zehuyot bi-yetsiratam shel yehudey irak (Arabness,

Jewishness, Zionism: A Contest of Identities in the Works of Iraqi Jews)(Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2005).

8 On this point, see Foreword in Ammiel Alcalay, ed., Keys to the Garden: New Israeli

Culture(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), vxii. Some of the writers I

have in mind are Ronit Matalon, Dorit Rabinyan, Haviva Pedaya, Dan Benaya-

Seri, Shimon Adaf, Dudu Busi, and Sara Shilo.

9 Quoted in Manuel M. Martin-Rodrigues, Recovering Chicano/a Literary Histo--

ries: Historiography beyond Borders, PMLA120, no. 3 (May 2005): 796805;quotation from 797. Originally in Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichte

der Literatur, Poetica7 (1975): 32544.

10 I borrow the term inventionfrom Ella Shohat, The Invention of the Mizrahim,

Journal of Palestine StudiesXXIX, no. 1 (1999): 520. As I understand and employ

it, the termMizrairefers to a collective identity created in Israel to distinguish

the totality of Asian, African, and southeast European Jews from the population

of East, Central, and West European Jews, who are collectively referred to as

Ashkenazim. (The categoryMizraimhas also subsumed Sephardim, which,

technically speaking, should refer only to the descendants of Spanish exiles,

rather than indigenous Asian and African Jewish communities.) In my view,

because it is an Israeli-produced identity, the term Mizraimshould not be used

to refer to Asian and African Jewish communities in their countries of origin,

much asAfrican Americanis meaningless outside the context of U.S. history and

would not be used to refer to West Africans in the seventeenth century. Hence,

when referring to the Jews of Arabic-speaking countries, the population thatwould come to form the majority of the Mizraim, I employ the termArab


34/48

160 y Lital Levy

Arabs.However, in recent years the term has become more widely used and

recognized in academic discourse, and has the distinct advantages of avoiding the

anachronism implied by the termMizraimwhen applied to a pre-1948 context,and of retaining a sense of cultural and linguistic association with Arabic. For

more on the problem of Arab Jewish identity, see Emily Gottreich, Histori--

cizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib,Jewish Quarterly Review98,

no. 4 (2008): 43351, and Lital Levy, Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in

theMashriq, The Jewish Quarterly Review98, no. 4 (2008): 45269.

11 Although I do not assume that this categorization is transparent or unproblematic, I

will use the termMizrai literatureto refer to the writings of Arab Jewish and

Mizrai authors, which by and large tend to be concerned with Middle Eastern

geographies and cultures and/or with the experiences of Mizraim in Israel. Of

course, not all writing by Mizrai writers is Mizrai literature; for instance, the

works of Orly Castel-Bloom do not sit comfortably under this rubric. For a fuller

discussion of this point, see Dror Mishani, Lamah tsrikhim ha-mizraim lazor

el ha-maabarah: Mashavot al ha-historyografya shel ha-kol ha-mizrai ba-

sifrut ha-ivrit (Why do Mizraim need to return to the maabarah?: Thoughts

on the historiography of the mizrai voice in Hebrew literature),Mi-taam

3

(2005): 9198.

12 See Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valds, eds., Rethinking Literary History: A

Dialogue on Theory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), especially

Hutcheon, chapter one, Rethinking the National Model, 343. As Hutcheon

notes, literary-historic narratives of marginalized groups written with the goal of

seeking inclusion often tend to replicate in structure the very narratives they

critique. In her words: Many interventionist narratives are teleological in

structure simply because their politics are goal driven. This goal orientation may

explain why these literary histories seem less nostalgic than utopian: they discuss

the past, but they aim toward both future progress (from exclusion to inclusion)

and a transformative impact on the general cultural narrative in which they

move (13).

13 See Shimon Ballas, Solo(Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1998), and Ve-hu aer (Tel Aviv:

Zmora Bitan, 1991); in English, Outcast, trans. Ammiel Alcalay and Oz Shelach

(San Francisco: City Lights, 2007).14 Ronit Matalon, Zeh im ha-panim eleynu(The One Facing Us) (Tel Aviv: Am oved,


35/48


15 Ammiel Alcalay,After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture(Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2728.

16 The book does not relate to the time period addressed in this article, except on pp.2034, where Alcalay briefly discusses the importance of the popular press in the

Middle East for the development of modern Jewish cultural life.

17 Alcalay clearly states, My work here does not, by any means, even pretend to be a

comprehensive history of the life and culture of the Jews of the Levant.After

Jews and Arabs, 27.

18 For a critique of the concept of modernity vis--vis Hebrew literature, as well as the

relation between Hebrew literature and Jewish literatures, see Gil Anidjar,Literary History and Hebrew Modernity, in idem, Semites: Race, Religion,

Literature(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 6783.

19 See Nancy Berg, Sephardi Writing: From the Margins to the Mainstream, in The

Boom in Contemporary Israeli Fiction,ed. Alan Mintz (Hanover, N.H. and

London: Brandeis University Press, 1997), 11442, quotation from 115. Berg

discusses novels that most overtly explore Sephardi [and Mizrai] identity. She

continues, In these works by Sami Michael, Amnon Shamosh, A. B. Yehoshua,

Shimon Ballas, and Dan-Banaya Seri, we can best observe the move from the

margin to the center, the shift from the mainstream to Sephardi, and alterna--

tively, the decision to remain on the outside (ibid.). Yet while Berg depicts the

different ways in which their novels challenge the hegemonic Zionist narrative,

she does not explain how this move to the center has happened, or what it

consists of: critical reception? book sales? translation into foreign languages?

adoption for use in the Israeli educational curriculum? The chapter was published

more than ten years ago and significant changes have taken place in Mizrailiterature since then; yet I am not sure that Mizrai literature has, as yet, gone

mainstream.

20 Michael Gluzman, The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew

Poetry(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). For a discussion of the

text that also touches upon Hever and Brenners books, see Adam Rovners review

in Prooftexts 24, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 24856.

21 Hanan Hever, Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon: Nation Building and MinorityDiscourse(New York: New York University Press, 2002), 5.


36/48

162 y Lital Levy

writers of the dominant Jewish culture: Ashkenazi Jewish men. See Berg,

Margins and Minorities in the Modern Hebrew Canon (book review),

Prooftexts 24, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 24048; quotation from 246.23 Hanan Hever, Ha-Sipur ve-ha-leom: kriah bikortit be-kanon ha-sifrut ha-ivrit(The

Narrative and the Nation: A Critical Reading of the Hebrew Literary Canon; Tel

Aviv: Resling, 2007). The book is based largely on the English version (Producing

the Modern Hebrew Canon), with a few additions: chapter three on Shami, chapter

four on Burla, and chapter fifteen on Matalon. Interestingly, Hevers chapter on

Matalon does not discuss her writing in relation to Mizrai literature; his reading of

Zeh im ha-panim eleynuis concerned largely with the motif of the photographs

while his criticism of Sarah, Sarah(Tel Aviv: Am oved, 2000) focuses on the

convergence of private and public violence and the body, culminating in the novels

closing lines on the murder of Rabin. See Ha-Sipur ve-ha-leom, 32943.

24 Rachel Feldhay Brenner,Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-

visioning Culture(Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 13.

25 Brenner does note that he was born in 1870 in Palestine and that he lived and

worked closely with Arabs (20) but does not mention his ethnicity or its

relevance to his views. Chelouche was a member of Ha-Magen (The Shield), a

group of Arabized Palestinian Sephardim that, in the years before World War I,

promoted an alternative plan for a shared homeland for Palestinian Jews and

non-Jews alike. On Chelouche, see Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Parshat ayay

(18701930) (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Bavel, 2005).

26 See the following works in Hebrew: Hever, Shenhav, and Motsafi-Heler, eds.,

Mizraim be-yisrael; Yigal Shvarts,Mah she-rom mi-kan: sugyot ba-historyografya

shel ha-sifrut ha-ivrit ha-adashah(The View from Here: Issues in ModernHebrew Literary Historiography) (Or Yehudah: Dvir, 2005); Hever, Ha-sipur ve-

ha-leom; and Yitzak Laor,Anu kotvim otakh moledet: masot al sifrut yisraelit(We

Write You, Homeland: Essays on Israeli Literature; English title,Narratives with

no Natives) ([Tel Aviv]: Ha-kibuts ha-meuad, 1995).

27 See Laor, Mihu Ashkenazi?: or be-idyologya shel A.B.Yehoshua (Who Is an

Ashkenazi? A Hole in A. B. Yehoshuas Ideology) inAnu kotvim otakh moledet,

10514.

28 Ma she-roim mi-kan, 1819.


37/48


30 See Ha-sipur ve-ha-leom, chapter three, Yitzak Shami: etniyut ke-konflikt bilti

patur, 6176. The chapter also appeared in English as Hever, Yitzhak Shami:

Ethnicity as an Unresolved Conflict, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of JewishStudies 24, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 12439. My quotation is taken from the English

version, 125. Ammiel Alcalay sees Shami and Burla as marginalized figures who

found a voice as authentic Orientals, enacting a kind of self-Orientalism,

depicting worlds they themselves had left behind; seeAfter Jews and Arab

Reorienting Hebrew Literary History- the View From the East

Documents

Transcript of Reorienting Hebrew Literary History- the View From the East